In Giron
by Melanie Pappadis Faranello

I wake at 5:15 am for the Fiesta de Torros, the festival of the bulls—an annual sacrifice in Giron, Ecuador, about an hour’s bus ride south of Cuenca. The moon is still out, and the night dogs are fighting over garbage in the street. A drunk man stumbles on the cobblestone as I make my way toward the bus station. The rising sun casts an orange glow off the station’s tin roof. My gringa friends are easy to spot—a silver-haired woman from New Mexico wearing a fanny pack and her zoom lens camera; a twenty-two-year-old blonde from Iowa who is taking a semester to learn Spanish; and a lively red-head, the most fluent of us, who has been in Cuenca the longest and works in the hostel.